Title: CasualtiesAuthor:alley_skywalkerCharacters/Pairings: Albus/Scorpius, Lily/OMC, Lorcan, LysanderRating: PGWord Count: 2,037Summary: The Second War is long over and the next generation of young witches and wizards are all grown up. But peace is once more broken by a revolt. No Dark Lord this time but society fractures along the old lines and those who have managed to straddle those lines are being torn apart by needing to take sides.Notes: Written for a prompt at hp_emofest.

Wars are reckless, cruel, vicious things. Civil wars are all of that times a thousand. In a regular war, a war against an outsider, one can unite with neighbors, take strength and courage from friends, cling to family. In a civil war everyone and everything is torn apart. Neighbors turn against each other, friends can no longer be trusted, families crumble under pressure of intrinsic loyalties and conflicting ideals. The whole world goes insane.

*

The first time Lorcan comes across someone from the other side, he is caught off guard. They both are. They simply crash into each other on the outskirts of a wizarding village. Lorcan’s purple robes, taking on a dark, almost black color in the night, camouflage well against the dense woods. The other man is cloaked, his robes are of a dark, deep black, perhaps with a missperformed disillusionment charm on them.

“Who are you?” Lorcan demands. He brandishes his wand in front of him, wishing Rose – who had just completed her Auror training – was here.

The man – or maybe it’s a woman, but Lorcan assumes by the height and stature that it’s a man – begins to back away.

“Who are you and what are you doing here?” Lorcan continues, watching as the cloaked figure takes several more steps back before running into a tree. The man gives a humph at the sudden impact and his hood falls off. For a moment they look at each other in silence and Lorcan almost drops his wand. “Lysander! We’ve been looking for you for days. Where the hell have you been?”

Somewhere far away, deep within the forest, an owl hoots mournfully. Lorcan watches his brother intently. Lysander stays quiet and a deep, gnawing fear begins to saw away at his heart. “Lysander, say something! Merlin, I thought you were one of them. Where have you been?” Lorcan starts toward his twin, wanting to feel relieved but not managing it.

Lysander pushes him away, roughly. “You should leave,” he says quietly. “Pretend we never saw each other. “ That is when Lorcan knows.

They both have their wands out now, pointing at each other. “Come back, Lysander. What did they tell you? What did your Slytherin friends promise you? I’m your twin brother, damn it!”

Lysander only scowls. “Shut up, Lorcan. You were never my brother. You were always satisfied to adhere to the rules of the Potter-Weasley clan; you hated me because I wasn’t a Gryffindor or a Gryffindor wannabe like you. You were always jealous of me!”

They begin to circle each other. “So you decided to go to the dark side?”

“There is no dark side, you idiot,” Lysander hisses. “Don’t you understand? I thought you, as a Ravenclaw, would be more level-headed! There is only magic. Real, powerful magic. We can learn from it, but you and those like you would have it locked away under paranoid laws.”

The moon catches on Lysander’s face and hair and his blond, long curls, which he’d always enjoyed cultivating, shine silver in the moonlight. Lorcan winces. His twin looks incredibly like their mother in that moment. “I can’t believe you. Mum fought the Death Eaters and you—“

“We are not Death Eaters,” Lysander says firmly, his voice a sharp staccato.

Lorcan sneers. “Yea? Then who are you?”

“We are The Resistance.” A long whistle shrieks through the woods and Lysander straightens and his entire body tenses.

“What was that? What does that mean?” Lorcan asks, dread crawling up his spine. He drops his guard, looking around. Lysander uses his distraction to apparate.

At home, Lorcan is met by his mother. “Any luck, Lorcan?” she asks, calmly, seemingly not at all worried as to what his answer will be. “Perhaps next time you should use the—“

“Lysander’s not coming home, Mum,” Lorcan blurts out.

She looks at him, calmly but not exactly blankly, then says, “The nargles ate his brain. Poor boy.”

Lorcan wants to scream because his twin, his other half, is somewhere out there, listening to Scorpius Malfoy’s idiotic friends and his parents are just the sort of people to simply accept this because they have no other ways of dealing with it. “I’m sorry, Mum,” he manages, before disappearing into the room he used to share with Lysander and locking the door.

For the next week, Lorcan burns all of Lysander’s old things. He doesn’t want to be reminded that he’d once had a brother.

*

Lily still remembers her wedding day as if it were yesterday. It was perhaps the most magical day of her life. She had married Amiri Rosier two years after graduating from Hogwarts despite all the whispering and head shaking from her parents and other relatives. Amiri had never been a politician. He was always much more interested in studying and creating. He is amazing at Charms and invents a new charm or spell several times in a year. Some are just variations on older spells but Lily finds the whole thing fascinating.

She was never initiated into Amiri’s circle of Slytherin friends but she didn’t think it was necessary. She was perfectly happy being Rosier’s spunky, redhead wife who makes the cool drinks and looks so very attractive on a summer day in a white dress under a pink parasol. Lily has her own friends with whom she has brunch and plays quidditch on the weekends and discusses families and her little baby boy who was born just this past year. She knows perfectly well that to bring her father anywhere near Amiri’s mother – Pansy Rosier, Parkinson in her maidenhood – would be the equivalent of starting a muggle nuclear war. No one would come out alive. So she and Amiri split the holidays in half between her family and his family and never dare to speak the word “reunion.”

Lily hadn’t really noticed how it had started. She was too busy being newlywed, and then too busy re-decorating the Rosier minor estate where she and Amiri lived, and then too busy being happily married. Then being pregnant. Then having the baby. By the time she realized what was going on, the first curses had been cast.

She isn’t sure how she had missed the sinister atmosphere in her drawing room when Tony Deschain (Dolohov, really, as Lily found out later), Scorpius Malfoy, Keith Rookwood, Ayer Avery and some others came to visit and have their brandy by the fireplace.

“Lily, you’re so lovely tonight. How is your brother?” Scorpius would ask.

“Albus is fine. You should write to him more often. He misses you,” she would reply lightly, pushing a strand of hair from her face. It had been so normal, so simple. Perhaps they had thought she was “one of them” now and had accepted her easily and therefore she had accepted them. Whatever it was, she never noticed until it was too late.

Now she sits at the top of the stairs in the dark, listening to the voices carrying up from Amiri’s study. He thinks she is asleep and didn’t bother with silencing charms. Rookwood and Malfoy are there, discussing their overthrow of the Ministry. She hears familiar names – Lysander, Lorcan, Albus, Rose, Teddy Lupin. She also hears the names of her parents and her aunts and uncles, spoken in low, venomous tones. Amiri had never kept secrets from her but he does now. She knows and it feels like her world has begun to slowly crack open.

“Your wife could become a liability,” Rookwood says.

“I won’t let you have Lily,” Amiri protests.

“She’s just a Potter.” Malfoy this time.

“She’s my wife. The mother of my son.”

“We need to hide your heir,” Rookwood says after a pause. “She and her family could use him as leverage against you…”

Lily knows Amiri will try to defend her but she is afraid that he, too, is suspicious of her, just waiting for her to misstep and betray him to her “maiden family,” as they call it. Lily wonders into the nursery where her son sleeps. Elliot is so small, just seventeen months. If she doesn’t do something he will become a bargaining chip in this damned war.

An owl is too risky, so Lily sends James a patronus. His comes back with instruction a half hour later. Thank Merlin their father had taught them how to communicate in this fashion. She wouldn’t have risked anything else. By this time she has gathered most of her necessary things and all of Elliot’s, including his favorite stuffed dragon. She bundles up her sleeping son and apparates, leaving a note for Amiri on her dressing table.

Ami, I’m sorry. I have loved you with all my heart but I cannot do this any longer. I will not become a bargaining chip in your ridiculous war. (You know I never gave a Merlin’s ass about blood Purity and family history.) I will not allow my son to become a bargaining chip. I wish I didn’t have to go because these past few years with you have been the happiest in my life but you have pushed me away and I have nowhere to fall but back into the arms of my parents and brothers. I’m sorry, I’m sorry…

Lily is trying very hard to not cry when she meets James at his flat. She’s shaking and clutching Elliot so tightly that he has awakened and begun to cry, his face turning red.

James meets her and embraces her. “Why didn’t you send the patronus to Albus?” he asks, ushering her inside.

Lily winces, bouncing her baby on her hip slightly, trying to calm him. She looks back at her eldest brother and blinks hard against the tears. “I don’t know if we can trust him.”

Scorpius leans over and kisses his bare shoulder before sliding from between the sheets and gong to the window. He flings it open, letting in cool, pre-dawn air into the room and lights up a smoke.

Albus flips over onto his back and stares at the ceiling. “Did you have to start a revolt?”

“Maybe not, if your father knew the meaning of the word diplomacy.”

“Pot calling the cauldron black,” Albus mutters.

“Don’t you start on that,” Scorpius warns.

“Let’s not argue,” Albus replies resignedly. “I just hate that we have to hide to be together. We had to do this when we were at Hogwarts and we still have to do it. At least there we had the Room of Requirement. Now all we have are these trashed up motel rooms in the middle of nowhere. Now we absolutely cannot be seen together because our bloody families have started up an entire new war. Is this never going to stop?”

“I don’t know, Al,” Scorpius says after a long pause. “But I’m not going to watch my world be run over by people who know nothing of its history and its traditions. I’m sure as hell not going to let your father dictate rules and morality to me. As you see, I’m not the only one thinks that way. We’re not trying to resurrect Lord Voldemort here. We are not dark wizards, regardless of what your father says. We just want our world back from the muggle filth that has infiltrated it. We want to progress, not regress.”

“I hate politics,” Albus moans softly. He stands and walks over to sit behind Scorpius on the windowsill. “Do you love me?”

“Yea.” Scorpius releases a large puff of white smoke into the night sky.

Albus wraps his arms around Scorpius from behind and they sit there for a long time in silence. “Do you think we’ll end up hating each other by the time this is over?”

“I hope not.”

Albus swallows and lays his check against the base of Scorpius’ neck, feeling his own heart pound out the rhythm of a funeral march. “And if we do?”

“Then we’ll become just another couple of casualties.”

A pale ray of watery morning sun creeps slowly over the horizon, and Scorpius closes the window and draws the curtains, shutting out the world.